Read Dangerously:
The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with a guide for our times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, including selections from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood.

How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics? Drawing on her experiences—from living in the Islamic Republic of Iran to immigrating to the United States—Nafisi seeks to answer this in her galvanizing guide to literature as resistance. Structured as a series of letters to her father, Nafisi explores the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more. Read Dangerously crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy, and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so.